Mobile News Adoption among Young Adults: Examining the Roles of Perceptions, News Consumption - Case Study Example

Student ID: Word Count: 1480 Chosen option: Mobile news adoption among young adults: Examining the roles of perceptions, news consumption, and media usage Tutorial group number: Tutor’s name: This study assumed the methodological method that involved carrying out an online survey study. The authors of this project set out to find out the adoption of mobile news among young adults who range between eighteen and twenty-four years. The study population targeted by this research is important as it is during this time that young adults are more likely to develop lasting preferences and consumption patterns for media news. Besides, it is critical to analyze the consumption patterns of media news with this population group since it is the young people who normally interact frequently with the newest technologies through entertainment and information. It is the young people who possess the latest cell phones and utilize them to access online information. Moreover, this age bracket is the ideal one to use in this study as most college students belong to the group and are the regular users of Internet. If this research was based on the older people or else children aged below ten years, it might not have produced accurate results since these age groups do not regularly use the internet and do not possess the latest technology. On the other side, by concentrating on this population group that utilize the internet regularly and is more comfortable using media news platforms tends to limit this study. College students might be forced for educational purposes to visit the internet, and this can help explain why they tend to use regularly the internet than their respective age mates who did not get the chance to join the university. Besides, they can easily access electronic technologies, such as laptops and cell phones than their respective age mates who are not in university. Additionally, this research just relied on the data collected and analyzed from just one age bracket rather than relying on various age brackets. The consumption of mobile news cannot be the same across different age brackets. It would have been advisable for this research to divide its population into several age groups, such as 12 years to 16 years, 17 years to 21 years and 22 years to 26 years. Therefore, generalizing the results of this research to the entire population age group of young adults can be methodologically wrong. This study utilized a large sample size that involved 384 students. A large sample size is significant while conducting research since it represents the entire population very well avoiding the negative effects of extreme observation and outlier. Also, it is important to have a large sample size to produce outcomes between variables which are meaningfully different. A qualitative research like this one requires a sample size that is large so as to widen the range of the collected information and creates a flawless picture of analysis thus reducing the possibilities of discovery failure. Moreover, a sample size which is large decreases sampling error and hence help guarantee quality sampling and correct statistical analysis of gathered data, yielding accurate outcomes. This research set out to find out the perceptions of youths regarding adoption of mobile news and thus having a large sample size allow the researchers to find out all the perceptions that may be important for the study. It is apparent that young people have different perceptions regarding mobile news and thus a suitable sample size raises the probability of discovering different perceptions. The researchers made use of the university database to enlist their study sample using random sampling. This method of sampling allows the researchers to obtain a sample easily as well as gives every member an equal chance of being part of the sample. Thus, it is an unbiased method for obtaining a study sample. Besides, the sample developed from random sampling tends to represent perfectly the whole population and it leads to unbiased sample selection. Henceforth, the study results obtained from such a sample can help arrive at an accurate conclusion about the population. When a study sample is more representative, it makes it logical to generalize the outcomes attained from the study sample to the whole population. Also, it was reasonable for the researchers to employ random sampling as they could get a list of the whole population of the college. However, this sampling method has one major drawback; high refusal rate. It is evident that this study experienced high refusal rate as most of the students who were sampled refused to respond to the research question. Just 384 students of the 755 enlisted responded. The instrument of research used by the researchers of this study to collect data included internet questionnaires. There are several merits of utilizing questionnaire as a technique of data collection. It was suitable to use questionnaires in this study as it is the best technique to examine users' preferences, patterns, ease of use and views of any particular technology. Also, questionnaires tend to be more objective compared to interviews since they gather data in a consistent way. Also, questionnaires are easier to administer as well as allow for a big sample size to be reached at fairly low cost. When participants enter their information online, it is automatically stored, making it accessible immediately for analysis. Moreover, questionnaires are convenient for research participants as they can respond to the questions at their own convenient time. Additionally, internet questionnaires do not need an interviewer, and therefore, the chances are high that participants will reveal personal information which they cannot disclose openly to another individual. However, questionnaires also have their drawbacks. The main disadvantage of using a questionnaire is the unwillingness of respondents to answer specific questions or answer them shoddily, or they might think they will not benefit in any way when they answer the questions. Besides, participants might respond to the questions sketchily, especially if the questionnaire is lengthy taking a lot of time to fill. Internet Questionnaires limit respondent accessibility as a certain population might not gain access to the internet. This may explain why only 384 participants responded out of the 755 contacted. The lack of an interviewer to clarify things during the data collection process may lead to unreliable data. The researchers first did a pretest of the questionnaire to enhance the validity and reliability of the information collected. Carrying out a pretest helps discover mistakes in questions and phrases which participants are possible to misconstrue and therefore correct them before administering the real questionnaire. Also, a pre-test can help find out some questions which most participants are more probable to skip because of various reasons and thus restructure it. Conducting a pre-test enables the researcher to correct errors in questionnaires, yielding valid, reliable questionnaires which will collect accurate data for the study. Conducting a pre-test in this study helped in reducing mistakes in questionnaires as out of the 384 questionnaires which were administered only 8 were incomplete. The merits of having a perfect instrument of collecting data far outweigh the expenditures involved when conducting a pre-test. The cost involved conducted a pretest for an online survey like this one includes the extra time and energy required to conduct the pre-test. The researchers developed possible research questions and used strong variables. This research had numerous research questions calling for the researchers to utilize multiple variable measures to enable them to obtain reliable answers to all the questions. To obtain reliable evidence when analyzing questionnaire data, it is significant to employ several variable measures of each theoretical variable that need to be correlated as well as observing the patterns of correlation between each independent variable's measure and the dependent variable. Moreover, the researchers collected all the necessary data touching on the control variables including marital status, age, gender, income level, education level, and ethnicity. These patterns of correlations can help the researcher determine if the outcomes are as a result of invalidity of one of the predictors or due to a third factor. To analyze their data, the researchers of this study utilized multiple regression models. The multiple independent variables' values obtained from multiple regression analysis allow the researcher to predict the dependent variable's value correctly. In this study, the dependent variable is mobile news adoption whereas the independent variables include the perceived usefulness of mobile news, the perceived relative advantage, and perceived ease of use of mobile news, media usage level and consumption levels. The dependent variable is consistent whereas some the independent variables are categorical and others consistent. Multiple regression models enhance flexibility whereby associations between variables might be included and allow for polynomial terms to be included. Multiple regressions are valuable when R2 is close to 1 since this allows more precise prediction. In this study, some of the values the R2 were very low implying that some the predictors were weak. But most of the predictors were strong in determining mobile news adoption by young people, and they included the perceived ease of use, the perceive utility and perceived the relative advantage of mobile news. Read More